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More bad ideas from our pals at the post office...

  • Thread starter swords
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At work tonight we were discussing the new idea the post office is tossing around, shutting down on either Tuesday or Wednesday - not Saturday! We have a post office in our building to handle our outgoing mail so we get to hear all the poop. I can only imagine what this will do for the live plant/animal shipping companies & hobbyists. It will suck for sure! :(

A few of us decided it might just be a way to get everyone to urge them to stay open all the days they are now, then they can more easily justify a $0.05 raise on stamps instead of the $0.01 proposed for the May increase - to "make up" for their losses between Nov-Dec....

Time to bail out the post office! lol!
 
a $0.05 cent raise in the stamps isnt going to cover how far they are in the hole........getting rid of one day worth of mail saves them 1/6th of their budget....they were $2.8 billion in the hole last year even after their increases....ppl just arent using the mail as much due to email, paypal and the like.....they are picking the day rather objectively by picking the day with the lowest flow.......and BTW as someone who has shipped critters and received critters from all over, using USPS to ship an animal is down right stupid they run late more often than Fedex or UPS.......
 
When ever you wonder about the logic or intelligence of a decision made by the post of is, remember they are a government agency. Though they tend to be one of the more efficient branches, they are still part of the the government and this should tell you all you need to know about why they chose Tuesday or Wednesday.
 
Whoever it was that came up with the $0.05 idea based it on reading the PO saying something in the paper to the effect of "every $0.01 increase equals a billion in revenue". Based on that they imagined they'd cover their losses and operating costs with a nickle increase. I didn't know what to think other than it'll suck for plants!

It's astonishing to me that they would choose to drop a day in the middle of the week and not Saturday when they're only open 1/2 a day anyway. I cringe to imagine myself remetering millions of envelopes for the first few months at work after this.

"So and so ran mail dated for Wednesday again, can you go next door and..."

:censor:
 
Whoever it was that came up with the $0.05 idea based it on reading the PO saying something in the paper to the effect of "every $0.01 increase equals a billion in revenue". Based on that they imagined they'd cover their losses and operating costs with a nickle increase. I didn't know what to think other than it'll suck for plants!

they lost 4.5% in the volume of pieces last year......will likely continue to drop this year as more and more ppl go to electronic payments.....the loss last year was $2.8 billion.....projected loss this year is over $6 billion even with the raise in May....and all this with the USPS activly cutting costs where they can....the post office makes most its money off of first class postage, for the first time ever last year standard mail volume exceeded the amount of first class and Standard mail gets them less than half the profit.....
 
Why not ship every day? There's a concept!
 
I think they'd be able to get themselves out of the red in less than 5 years if the fat cat executives at the top would quit giving themselves those bonuses (sound familiar? Hint: AIG & the other financial/investment companies) at the end of the year for "making the Postal Service profitable". I wouldn't mind getting a bonus that's more than I make in 3 years at my present wages, for sitting on my duff, doing a bunch of "make work", and micromanaging those under me like they were brainless dolts. :crazy:
 
actually the biggest expenditures are gas and salary......and the salary part isnt where you think......in the smaller post offices that make up the vast majority of the employees in the USPS, they do not have enough employees on staff so most everyone that works on Saturdays gets paid over time....i know this is the case here.....i also know a major change they are proposing, atleast in Montana, is to get rid of shift supervisors which will cut down on the salary end of things while keeping those that actually do the majority of the work...
 
The PO doesn't have a lot of options. They'd like to close a lot of those little POs and end home delivery in a lot of rural area, but even mentioning it raises a political firestorm. It makes sense from a narrow economic perspective, but would be a great loss. The mail has more value to American culture/society than just the value of dropping off the bills & junk mail every day.
 
  • #10
.in the smaller post offices that make up the vast majority of the employees in the USPS, they do not have enough employees on staff so most everyone that works on Saturdays gets paid over time... i know this is the case here..

That's how it is here too. Until a couple years ago we still had old timers in beat down station wagons with an orange sign sign stuck in the hood that said "US Mail" delivering the rural routes! lol :D
 
  • #11
One place I lived in Maine had a little PO set up in the front porch of a woman's house. She even had some PO boxes. There was no delivery and people without a PO box just got their mail at a little counter. I never got much mail and she'd call me if anything came for me. After I moved, she kept forwarding mail to me even after the forwarding deadline and would write a note on the envelope saying she hoped things were going well. Unfortunately, it was one of the POs that closed back in the 90s, but maybe she didn't want PO stuff cluttering up her front porch anymore and retired. Bean counters look at a situation like that and are horrified by the inefficiency, but it brought people together and we need more, not less of that.
 
  • #12
We have a small PO here, too. They are short handed. They need at least one more employee to help cover for someone taking vacation or falling ill. Two more would be better. One upside to the economic downturn is they were able to do this past Christmas without overtime.

Any way my point is they are "saving" money by not replacing all the people who retire or move on to other offices or jobs.
 
  • #13
I would imagine one of the reason they are considering droping a day during the week and staying open saturday is because many people who have 9-5 jobs m-f cant make it to the post office except on saturday. If my local post office is any indication the branches are busiest on saturday.
 
  • #14
That's how it is here too. Until a couple years ago we still had old timers in beat down station wagons with an orange sign sign stuck in the hood that said "US Mail" delivering the rural routes! lol :D

actually we have that here for the rural routes and one thing to keep in mind those that do rural route 90% of the time ARE NOT USPS employees they are contract laborers and they do not get the benefit packages the regular USPS employees do......
 
  • #15
Here in canada, they are open mon-fri only, no weekends, don't bother looking for any plants in the mail on the weekend. No bills either though, but that's what's great, no stresses till monday. You need to do business with canadapost, do so during the week! The mail they would send out on saturdays would be spread out between mon-tues-wed... and they wouldn't have to pay employees OT, cause they'd have the weekend off, we all know it is better to have a happy mailman, than an unhappy one... my2¢
 
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